ProperTea

A thousand times this.

I think she'll definitely do it at some point. She came to the NME Awards to give Emily Eavis the godlike genius award which suggests she has some kind of connection to the festival to me: https://www.nme.com/news/music/billy-bragg-and-taylor-swift-strike-up-friendship-after-presenting-godlike-genius-at-nme-awards-2020-2609286 Her current vibe though seems to be to just absolutely drag every possible penny out of all of her fans so I can't see it being for a while.

(I say all this as someone who's going to the Eras tour 😅)

Because Taylor is one of the most financially focussed artists in history - the Margaret Thatcher of pop. She'll make loads more money from her own tour to add to the billion she already has, and can do Glastonbury at some point in the future for the street cred when she's done rinsing her fans by getting them all to buy 72 limited edition vinyls of every release.

I get the impression he's no longer really involved in the festival in terms of decision making and Emily is firmly in charge now.

The next wet year is going to be the big test I think!

Interesting to note that Dua Lipa's 2020 livestream concert was produced by Block 9: https://www.block9.com/work#/dua-lipa-studio-2054/ Glastonbury Festival’s Emily Eavis told the BBC “I absolutely loved Dua Lipa's one (livestream). It was designed by the team behind Block9, one of our late-night areas, and it really captured that proper club feel. It had us dancing around in the living room, by the fire. It really set the bar for live streams, I think, and I heard 5 million people tuned in, which is huge”

Sorry to post a Daily Heil link but apparently she's doing a stadium tour this summer... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12794069/Dua-Lipa-embark-stadium-tour-year-huge-success-Future-Nostalgia-roadshow-Shes-going-2024.html

I googled the sentence and this thread is the only thing that appears, so I think it's new copy.

Could she not just lip sync the whole thing like Dolly Parton or Janet Jackson?

I think between the two sites it's 15,000 but I have no idea where I read that!

Just to add to this, it's not my experience either. It was strictly enforced in 2023 for me.

I wonder if part of the issue is the homogenisation of music tastes - everyone wanting to go and see the same things, which wasn't so much of a thing even ten years ago?

And the problem with having a lot of ticketholders who go there by chance, is that you'd then have tens of thousands of the hardcore crew, the ones usually rewarded for their perseverance, that used to go every year, trying to break in. So the problem of jibbing would intensify massively in the event of a lottery system, I reckon.

I think she said "that's not a conversation we're having" when asked about Spice Girls which is probably the strongest dumb down I've heard her say!

Easy pass out (EPO) wristbands have a QR code on them that gets scanned when you leave the festival, and when you come back in again. Local tickets can be transferred "up to 5 times" so the photo on the ticket doesn't have to match the person using it. Without wanting to go in to specifics, there's a loophole at the moment whereby someone can go in to the festival on a local ticket, get a wristband, then remove the wristband when they are inside the festival, give both the wristband and the local ticket to someone to take out of the festival, who then changes the name on the back of the local ticket to someone (in exchange for say for £500), and gives them both the local ticket and smuggled out wristband to be used through a re-entry lane. There's another step involved but I don't want to post too much detail. Basically this wouldn't be possible with the EPO wristband, as when the person gets their wristband scanned for re-entry, the system would say that wristband hadn't been scanned out (and therefore the person whose wristband it is should be in the festival). If there was a legitimate mistake the ticket office could sort it, but it would be obvious if the same wristband was being used multiple times. In a nutshell, it means the festival would know how many times an individual wristband has been used to exit/re-enter and would make the local ticket loophole and other re-entry blags extremely obvious. They would also be able to void individual wristbands for all gates from a control centre.

I definitely think this will happen in the next couple of years; the technology is working really well now and I think could be rolled up. It would immediately end the local ticket blag and most of the other blags, then you'd just have the bunkers to deal with in the main (and fake tickets).

100%. I also think the increasing ticket price is a factor. £500 to get hidden in the back of a traders van is now only £130 more than you'd pay for a ticket. £750 for the local villager ticket loophole trick is £380 more than a standard ticket. So it means that paying to jib in isn't vastly more expensive than a standard ticket now.

Because this is now so easily accessible and done on such an industrial scale I can see the festival attempting to crack down a bit in the future (closing the local ticket loophole, starting to search boots on staff vehicle gates etc). I was chatting to a gate supervisor in 2023 and they said they estimated now that 5% of attendees don't have a ticket. That's 10,000 people. If it grows to 15,000 in 2024, then 20,000 in 2025 etc. that's not sustainable, even with the improved crowd management measures they introduced in 2023.

The biggest way of jibbing is the local villager loop hole which the festival are completely aware of but do nothing about.

It's interesting that Eminem has a bisexual, non-binary child, given his previous use of language in his lyrics.

My favourite Pyramid miming moment was when Billy Ray Cyrus came out with Miley a bit wobbly, couldn't find his microphone in time, but somehow managed to project his voice around the entire Pyramid field? 2 minutes 40 seconds in the below.. 🤣 https://youtu.be/4GbZGloCM8M?si=sXhb6NCdwI6C_uKQ

Just to add - this isn't "the old days". It happens now on an absolute *industrial* scale, potentially in the thousands, between the local villager ticket loophole & people paying to go in the back of traders vans which very rarely get checked. I guess the only difference is it's people paying to bunk in now, although you do still get the odd successful runner (and those that get caught just get dropped off outside the gates to try again)

My friend (well, not a friend but someone in our wider group) got through 6 times and bought tickets for 36 of us in our spreadsheet. I am afraid to ask whether any nefarious efforts were used and the others in my group (who aren't eFesties/across online festival chatter) are just like "wow that's amazing, you're so lucky!"... I guess what I'm saying is, would it be fair to cancel all tickets bought on those servers if people didn't even know this method had been used to acquire their tickets? All we were told by the person that got our tickets who was in the wider group was that he'd managed to get through 6 times, that was it. It's only after the fact that I'm seeing all this stuff about backdoors and piecing things together and feeling concerned.